“Feedback!” explained our friend, a medical student and ex-New Yorker. “San Francisco is all about feedback. The people here don’t complain, really, they just fill you in on how things are going.” Our friend kept talking about “feedback sandwiches.” But on the BART, in the café, at City Lights, we thought we were the only people talking, let alone complaining. More…
Documentaries now do what both TV news and horror movies used to do—break real stories and scare the shit out of you. Gasland, a documentary and personal essay film about hydro-fracking, provided the year’s scariest image—water from people’s faucets bursting into flames. This one image of tap water on fire should be able to bring down Halliburton. More…
The current notion that 3D somehow radically changes, or will save, cinema—either by dragging it further toward some aesthetic destiny or just by bringing more asses into the theater—is the kind of apocalyptic idea that comes out of a crisis perception, as happened before during the crisis of the early 1950s, when Hollywood studios were desperate for some gimmick to lure viewers back to the box office; let’s call it Bwana Devil Syndrome. More…
What begins as an interesting documentary about how Banksy and other famous graffiti artists make their art soon turns into a semi-mockumentary that plays into people’s desire to believe the art world is too easily manipulated and therefore something they don’t have to pay attention to; that, in fact, they would be idiots to pay any attention to it at all. More…
Last February, I went to a screening of a film I love, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. In Jeanne Dielman, a middle-class Belgian single mother and part-time prostitute (she stays at home for that, too) spends two-hundred minutes doing dull housework and then stabs one of her clients to death with scissors. It’s a long haul. More…
Good movies, or at least pleasurably bad movies, make the worthless ones even worse. They remind us that watching Kick-Ass was not inevitable, that there are other, better ways to spend a Tuesday afternoon, an afternoon that will not come again. Maybe you can get your money back but not your time, and so whatever worth Kick-Ass has is only as a memento mori. More…
The Headless Woman does fuse the schematic and the intricate. But once you’ve granted Martel her brilliantly established premise and her fastidious approach, both the crude social schema and the delicate filigree of private relationships come to seem like features of the observable, inevitable world rather than impositions by the director. More…
From the moment I wake up in the morning, I live in a world fraught with danger. Is this going to be the day that some disgruntled reader mails me a toxic substance? It happened once, in the 1980s—a gram of odorless dung in the kind of tiny plastic bindle dealers use for meth, with an unsigned letter reading “Have some dialectical materialism! The Kremlin dishes it out every day!” More…
Somehow, the sentence “I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the 1980s” sounds depressing. In truth, growing up there was excruciating. The economy in my town was centered on education. That is not a bad thing in itself, but it bred a smugness which rendered my childhood a minimalist dystopia in which pop culture had to be consumed surreptitiously. More…
America is a country of overgrown boys, stunted and warped, who, left to their own devices, are fit to do little more than play video games, stare at pornography, and crack jokes about genitals, flatulence, and defecation. The country’s womenfolk match men’s obnoxious behavior with a reflexive shrewishness. They are ever vexed by anxiety about their diminishing horizons and fading looks. More…
Pedro Costa’s films are meant to be letters. For Costa, letters act as metaphors, ways of addressing the possibilities of cinema. In a speech at the Tokyo Film School in 2004, he told his audience that making a good film is like writing a love letter in a bank: “Few people are going to see this love letter in a bank, and still fewer are going to write a love letter in a bank. . . . Your work is to continue trying to write love letters, and not checks.” More…
The surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard used to enter movie theaters at random and stay only a little while, until the plot became clear to them and the films’ images were drained of their power. In the Cineplex you can do the same thing all in one building. I did that one day this summer. What I saw was not excerpts from ten different movies, but one movie made up of ten interchangeable parts—the imperial power of Hollywood, still alive and well, surviving postmodern fragmentation and resisting détournement. More…
We’re very pleased to announce the imminent launch of N1FR, our new online film review. If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you may already have seen a preview of the issue. If not, you’ll have to wait until next week. More…
It takes some work to make people into wildlife. Nature shows, for starters, have narration. They are shot from the perspective of the scientist, or the tour guide, or the hunter—some human spectator. Babies does the reverse. It takes away the linguistic meaning “natural” to human life, transforming it into a mere sound, pleasant as a rushing stream or a whistling wind. More…
Anderson has succumbed to the same Salinger syndrome that plagued the Tenenbaum kids. He proved himself a boy genius, and now he doesn’t want to grow up, and probably doesn’t know how. Perhaps he sensed that there is an artistic limit to the parody and decided that he’d rather cruise the high seas animating jellyfish than remove the faux from his earnestness. More…
The new work by Noah Baumbach is of interest as a confused deployment of contemporary status symbols. The three cardinal post-collegiate vanities are career achievement, coupledom, and procreation, and these are all that are at stake in Greenberg. More…
Moore’s film has revived the old debate on the left between ends and means. If Bush is thrown out of office thanks to Fahrenheit 9/11, is it enough? Or ought a man who rose to power dishonestly be thrown out honestly? Slate’s David Edelstein recounts an argument with a friend, angry over Moore’s inclusion of the now famous grieving mother, Lila Lipscomb. More…
Someone is walking somewhere from someplace—so begins an Eric Rohmer movie. Two secretaries in an office chat about nothing in particular; mail is sorted; a boat is at sea. The pointless opening is crucial for establishing the rhythm of these movies, and what happens as they unfold is not that events get more exciting but that the pointless events grow richer . More…
James Cameron’s 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath. But I can’t help but also attribute the headache to the movie’s moral corruptness. More…
Stephanie Meyer has said that the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream, but it may as well have come to her in a graduate seminar. There are, after all, few other contexts where so much cultural baggage comes together under the sign of so many backpacks. More…
I dislike alien/zombie movies and vowed I would never see another after 28 Weeks Later (the worst sequel in the world and a clumsy parable for the war in Iraq). But District 9 is nimble. It does not abandon its allegory in favor of interminable chase scenes, paramilitaries with poor aim, and spumy alien entrails; it incorporates these things judiciously. More…
The pathos of comedians used to be that they were funny because they wanted everyone to love them. They were motivated by their psychic wounds, their difficult personalities, their inability to tolerate the world as they found it. Gags and jokes were a way to triumph over brute physical reality and the intractability of the human race. More…
Examined Life ignores and therefore refutes television techniques. It is serene yet exciting, allowing us to understand and experience the mind-states evoked by the thinkers in the movie: “anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity” (Ronell); philosophy emerges from “personal catastrophe lyrically expressed” (West); “we should develop a much more terrifying abstract materialism” (Zizek). More…
Encounters at the End of the World gratifies on three levels: it is apocalyptic, it has cute penguins, and it stars a man with a German accent berating us because we are inadequate. It is an animal show, end-of-the-world adventure travel, and a trip to a German dentist. Herzog’s impatience with people has become palpable. More…
For two months this summer the only movies I watched were movies about the war on terror. While other moviegoers were enjoying cinematic treats like You Don’t Mess with the Zohan and The Happening, or the revival of Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, or that Norwegian movie that everybody liked so much, I was immersed in the backlog of global war-on-terror movies released since 2002. More…
For a few weeks every summer I escape the humidity of Brooklyn and go to Oakland, California. I stay on a street that runs off an iron drawbridge into the town of Alameda. Alameda sits on an island in the San Francisco Bay. To me, Alameda is an enchanted place. It is everything you want America to be but never is. When I retire, I’d like to move there and run for mayor. More…
Since Portnoy’s Complaint Philip Roth has been our national chronicler of horny male vigor. Not because such characters are a constant in his work (they aren’t), but because they boast a vividness that verges, just barely, on the cartoonish. And because they are smart—and, amazingly, it helps. More…
Few movies have been so adept at providing easy metaphors for their own incompetence. But The Dark Knight, while doing this, eagerly does more: it presents itself as not just a comic book movie (though it is decidedly that); it is also an allegory, as thick as the Divine Comedy, for the condition of America’s debilitated relationship to the world. More…
I have a red-and-white Netflix envelope in my hand, sealed and ready to be returned. I must have watched the movie in it, but I can’t remember what it was. The ground rises to meet me; this appears to be one of those dreams where you experience your own demise. I crash and feel my bones break. The DVD inside the Netflix envelope shatters, but the envelope remains intact, not even torn. More…
You may think it’s unfair to judge a movie based on seeing eighty minutes of a pirated DVD in a health-clinic waiting room. The banks of fluorescent lights did not create an optimum screening environment, it’s true, nor did the moans of pain, nor the old lady sitting next to me. But as I sat there, in pain myself and barely able to focus, I realized that this was the future of moviegoing. More…
I didn’t see Juno it because I hated Little Miss Sunshine so much. After I saw Little Miss Sunshine I really wished I hadn’t. I refuse to make that mistake again. If that’s what a feel good movie is, I can’t stand to feel that good. It’s physically painful for me to feel that good. More…
It helped Pennebaker’s documentaries that they were nearly contemporary with their subject, humanizing him against the tide that claimed him as a new Isaiah. But since then, Dylan’s music has gotten worse, while his image in the nostalgic public mind—thanks to marketing by record labels and their useful idiots in the media (like Scorsese)—has been perpetually burnished. More…
Directed and produced by relative newcomer Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is above all a vehicle for the ideas of its oddly charismatic presenter, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian intellectual billed in this film’s opening credits as “philosopher and psychoanalyst,” who has risen to prominence for his deft fusions of popular culture and Lacanian theory. More…
Van Sant does not sensationalize. Instead, in each film we see plot distilled to a single, profound arc: the slow, strange transition of a body from being alive to not being alive. Taking the silence, the mystery, the essential unknowability of death as a given, Van Sant makes no attempt to interrogate or explain. He simply enacts this transition and encourages his viewers to watch. More…
People over age 50 are signally absent from Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s a neighborhood where members of the “creative class” move during their breeding years to mate, spawn, and keep housepets. All three of Noah Baumbach’s films partake of the neighborhood and its pathologies. More…
It makes sense that critics have embraced this indie—and its vision of love as a salve—during a month when the romantic comedy at the top of the box office charts, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, locates love in ultraprofessional homicidal violence. While the cineplex revels in bosom, brawn, and blowing stuff up, the art house preens its emaciation and wants to stay safe and warm. More…
Suburban-spawned urban hipsters harbor a famous animus for suburbia. Call it the father-killing side of the Oedipal impulse whose mother-loving component is the type of nostalgia enacted in obsessive conversation about 1980s trivia or trophy dog ownership by dwellers of closet-size apartments. Of course, if the suburbs weren’t so stifling, misfit youths wouldn’t grow up to be hipsters. More…
The perfect woman is married to your best friend. Or she’s his mistress. She’s your wife’s younger sister. Or she’s engaged to your rich brother-in-law. She’s a few months shy of being legal. She’s a student in the class you teach. Or she’s been committed to a mental institution in Hawaii. By no means is she your wife. And chances are you haven’t slept with your wife in months. More…
What happens when you make a film and every single person interviewed has no idea what they are talking about? In this case you’re making a film about the music industry. DIG!, a well-crafted documentary focusing on The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, manages to piece together a compelling work out of the thoughts and actions of a lot of ignorant and delusional people. More…
